Okay, ATi just launched their Catalyst Driver for August. So I've been installing it on my systems, kicking the binaries, and seeing how it performs. In DirectX rendering modes the driver seems fairly competent. In older OpenGL 1.x and 2.x applications, such as F.E.A.R.
, Quake Live, NOLF
, and so on, performance seems fine there too.
In City of Heroes, which leverages OpenGL 3.x for it's ultra-mode graphics, the performance has never really been where I would think it should be on the graphics cards, at least compared to DirectX titles. City of Heroes is extremely difficult to reliably benchmark. There is, however, a software application that does leverage OpenGL 3.x / 4.x API calls, and is a reliably benchmark with easily repeatable results: Unigine Heaven 2.1.
So I pitted the Heaven 2.1 benchmark against my Radeon cards running on AMD's latest driver in both DirectX 11 and OpenGL rendering modes under Windows NT6. For those wondering why I didn't also run Unigine Heaven 2.1 under Mepis Linux to compare OpenGL performance differences between Windows and Linux, it's because the benchmark application doesn't work on Mepis Linux 8.5, or previous versions for that matter. Now I don't know if this is because Unigine Heaven 2.1 is just badly coded, or because some components of Mepis Linux 8.5 are best described in terms of computer paleontology. I'd be more concerned about this if Unigine Heaven 2.1 wasn't effectively bleeding edge software.
Anyways, getting back to the benchmarks themselves, starting with my primary system running Crossfired 5770's atop a Phenom II. In 1920*1200 with Crossfire Active, Unigine Heaven 2.1 posted a score of 947:
Against the same computer, nothing changed but the API, Heaven 2.1 posted a score of 325:
That's a huge difference in performance when nothing but the API is changing. I also happen to know, from the likes of Valve Software and ID Software, that from an API standpoint, there's no performance difference between DirectX or OpenGL. Ergo, on the surface, there is something seriously screwed up with either Unigine's software or with ATi's drivers.
Okay. So, same two graphics cards, different base computer. This one being the Intel I7 920
Engineering Sample. To make this clear, this is not a comparison of Unigine Heaven 2.1 against different hardware platforms. This is a comparison of Unigine Heaven 2.1 against different API's Under DirectX in 1280*1024 this system posted a score of 1284.
Same computer system, all that's changed is the API, and it scores 493
Again, OpenGL performance is roughly 1/3 of the DirectX performance. The performance difference is repeatable, under different resolutions, on entirely different base computer systems. Now, at this point, I was going to test the HD 5770 cards outside of Crossfire rendering mode, only I ran into a rather large problem.
The 10.8 driver is an unstable mess with these cards on 64bit Windows NT6. During the Install of the 10.8 driver on my Phenom II system, the HDMI audio driver kept failing to install. On the I7 system, things were a bit worse. When I turned it on in Windows mode, it blue-screened. System restore which took me back to 10.4 OpenGL 4.0 preview driver, update to 10.8, reboot, blue-screen. Restore again, install 10.7 driver, everything's fine. Install 10.8 driver, everything's fine during that session, but reboot, and blue-screen.
Ergo, I'm forced to conclude that not only are there some rather serious performance problems with the 10.8 driver, there are some serious issues with the 10.8 driver in regards to system stability, at least on the RadeonHD 5x00 series cards I have in my hands.
Next question: Is this a problem shared by all of the ATi OpenGL 3.x / 4.x cards? Or is this a problem solely related to the 5x00 series cards? Well, to start off this testing, I turned to my RadeonHD 4850 system backed by an Intel Core 2 Duo. It ran fine yesterday when I did the initial Crossfire-On benchmarks. Spent the night turned off, turned on fine, no blue-screens, no other problems. So, how did it do under Unigine Heaven 2.1?
With a resolution of 1360*768, in DirectX 11 API rendering mode, this system scored 1793
Under OpenGL, nothing else changed, the system scored 904:
Okay, the good news is performance is no longer one third. The bad news is, the performance gap is still pretty wide, just on the positive side of 50%.
Since that's how ATi cards perform in Unigine Heaven 2.1, how about Nvidia cards?
Well, as I've mentioned before, I don't actually have any GTX 400 series cards on hand to test with. The most recent cards I have from Nvidia on hand to test with are some GTS 250's. Like the RadeonHD 4850 they are an OpenGL 3.x class gpu.
In a resolution of 1680*1050 leveraging DirectX, the GTS 250 system managed to score 1436:
Nothing else changing but the API, the GTS 250 turned in a score of 1200:
Okay. Yes, there is a performance drop here, but OpenGL still delivered 83% of the performance that DirectX delivered. This is a more acceptable delta of change considering that fast-pass OpenGL 3.x / 4.x rendering applications are still very new and drivers could be unoptimized.
Unoptimized drivers are one thing, but the sheer performance difference between the DX11 and OpenGL API's just continues to raise questions. All of these systems so far have been running their respective multi-gpu modes. How exactly would they perform outside of their multi-gpu rendering modes? Well, as mentioned earlier, I was going to do these tests on the RadeonHD 5770 because of the near 1/3 performance difference, but wound up not being able to because of driver stability issues. I'm still trying to sort those problems out.
I can however look at the RadeonHD 4850 and Geforce GTS 250 systems in single card rendering modes.
The RadeonHD 4850, with the DX11 API, and no other changes than disabling Crossfire, achieved a score of 1064:
Under OpenGL with Crossfire turned off the system achieved a score of 931:
Going back to an older system, I ran Unigine Heaven 2.1 atop a Mobile RadeonHD 2600. This GPU is actually too weak to give any meaningful input. Under DX11 it only managed a score of 192:
Under OpenGL, it turned in a score of 151:
Well, that seems to be one problem sorted. Crossfire does not seem to be activating for Unigine Heaven 2.1, at least on the RadeonHD 4850, but the single card performance difference between the OpenGL and DirectX 11 API's are not that extensive.
For comparison, the Geforce GTS 250 under the DirectX 11 API with SLI disabled achieved a score of 867:
The same Geforce GTS 250 system under the OpenGL API with SLI disabled achieved a score of 849:
The immediate conclusion is that SLI is activating for Unigine Heaven 2.1, but Crossfire is not. This explains the 50% performance difference between the RadeonHD 4850 in Crossfire under DirectX and OpenGL, but not the 70% performance difference between the RadeonHD 5770 in Crossfire under DirectX and OpenGL.
Some time ago I was asked what I thought was the best written web-comic. Was it Sluggy Freelance, was it PvP, was it Schlock Mercenary, It's Walky, College Roomies from Hell, Clan of the Cats, Wandering Ones, RPG World, or the like? I surprised the person asking the question by naming a sprite comic as the best written web comic running.
Generally, I hate sprite comics. Free hosting sites like Keenspace were flooded with people putting various sprite rips of Mario, Sonic, and Mega-man together. Some of the sprite comics did rub off on me, such as Bob and George and Alan Solivan's Author Space.
Bob and George was largely a pioneer in the sprite-comic world, and if you can think of a cliche that's used in sprite comics, Bob and George probably did it first. Author Space was largely a spin-off of Alan's The Rogue's Gallery comic, one I enjoyed not only for Alan's great artwork, but also because it was genuinely well written.
As time went on, Bob and George became not just a home page for the webcomic featuring Bob and George, but also a portal to some of the better sprite comics. Sure, a lot of the comics posted through Bob and George were junk, but some gems did shine through.
There was Universal Voyage which was excellent, until I think NW got clonked on the head by Reichsman or something. Oddball Fancomics was worth a read. Evil Inc., which is not related to the spin-off from Greystone Inn was one of the better comics. Taco: the Comic started off slow, but trust me, get to the world ending flood of Taco's, and you'll be glad you did so.
The best comic by far though, and I mean, it really was the best comic, was Ramnesis's Jailhouse Blues. The jokes were original, the plot-line was ludicrous, and the sense of meta-humor through the whole comic just worked. I'd be hard-pressed to name any other web-comic that I looked forward to updating as much as I did Jailhouse Blues.
Then Ramnesis just... disappeared. Nobody on the Bob and George forums knew what happened to him, or if they did, they weren't saying. What was worse for readers like me is that Ramnesis was in the middle of a story-arc that had just exited an extensive psychotic dream scenario and had gotten back to the main story arc against a... well... transforming, regenerating reploid that has gone maverick. Players of any Megaman X game are probably blinking and praying they didn't read that right.
Does Jailhouse Blues stack up as one of the best written webcomics now?
Oh no. Howard Taylor's Schlock Mercenary has come a long way in it's story quality since the days when Jailhouse Blues was updating. There's also comics like Girl Genius and Erfworld being updated these days, and they set a pretty high bar for writing quality.
That being said, the lack of an ending for Jailhouse Blues has always bugged me. I keep wondering what happened to Ramnesis anyways? When other webcomics have ended, many without really resolving plotlines, I basically haven't cared. I doubt there's any that I'd be searching for 3 or 4 years later wondering if the author ever got around to writing a proper ending.
Jailhouse Blues? Well, it was good enough back then to keep me hoping that somewhere Ramnesis will pop back-up and at least finish the story.
Not exactly the post I started with... but while putting together a new guide I got fed up with Google's new in-Blogger picture loading system. Quite simply, the newly exposed in-Blogger composer is not ready for any kind of usage. After filing a bug report in the Blogger help section for stuff that's broken I decided to take on the in-Blogger font controls as well. Since I've been on Blogger I've never really said much about the behind the scenes controls exposed for fonts in the content generator. I've often accepted that Blogger is a relatively free-of-financial cost product that is made available as it leverages Google's core competency: Advertising Distribution through Search.
Google's continued development of Blogger, as well as it's exposure as a tool for Commercially Oriented Blogs, finally warranted something being said on the said state of the internal font controls as they are applied to user generated content. The font controls of the old blogger interface were pathetic at best. Let me demonstrate with a picture of the old in-Blogger composer as accessed through Firefox.
Here I've typed out 3 lines of text. Now I am going to apply a single Font change to these 3 lines:
Now I'm going to access the Edit Html tab at the top of the composer:
Each line of text has been given it's own separate span tag. Now I'm going to go back to the Compose tab and select Font Size.
With my font size set as small, I'm now going to click back on the Edit Html tab:
My entire file size has exploded. I checked in Open Office. There are 339 characters in this HTML generation. The original text only had 92 different characters. Blogger's composing system added 247 new characters, more than tripling the raw text. I now have 5 different sets of commands to set the font size to 85% and 3 different commands to set the font itself to Courier.
The actual amount of HTML code needed to generate the text I want is signifcantly smaller:
As can be seen, with just a total of 149 characters I have the same exact text formatting output.
So that's the old Composer. One would think that Google's new Composer system would fix some of this ludicrous over-use of HTML tags.
The short answer is that no, the new composer actually makes the HTML generation even WORSE than before. The browser that you use will also influence just how many redunant HTML commands are included in the Blogger HTML generation. So here we have the Blogger composer under Google-Chrome using the older editing interface.
Our Text here uses 62 characters. The Blogger HTML generator uses significantly more characters:
No, that is not your eyes decieving you. That is 1,097 characters. More than 1,000 characters have been added to the document source just to describe the formatting on 4 lines comprised of 62 characters.
Is the new Composer system any better? Well, here's the plain text in the new Composer Interface:
Again, this is just 4 lines of text with just 62 characters set to Font Courier with a size of small. This is the HTML generation in the new Composer:
Believe it or not, the amount of HTML has actually gone up, with a total character count of 1168characters. The new Composer system adds 71 new characters. The entire system is OUT OF CONTROL.
Now, I realize that all of the pictures shown thus far deal with converting existing text into the text format I want to use. Is the system really this bad when I am just generating text as a new input? To find out I'm going to use Seamonkey's Composer system to generate the html, and then do the same generation in Google's online system.
With Seamonkey I was able to specify the font type of Courier and font size of small before I actually entered the text:
This is the HTML Source that Seamonkey Compozer generated from 63 characters:
As can be seen, Seamonkey Compozer took 297 characters to fully describe the text, the line breaks, the page, and the pertinent meta data to describe the text as a standalone HTML page. Of this, only 162 characters were used to actuallydescribe the text itself, including the line breaks. Of those 162 characters, 134 characters are used to describe the text without the line breaks.
Of the actual HTML commands, Seamonkey Composer correctly used only two commands to dictate the text formatting. One 'small' command to dictate relative font size, and one font-change command. The result is a relatively efficient use of HTML.
Now, for the comparison, here's how Google Chrome does with Google Blogger. There is another bug with the new content generation system here alone. I can not dictate a font size and type of font before I start entering text. I have to actually enter some text first, then I can specify the size of the font and the type of the font.
As can be seen, I have not typed out the full 4 line character test from before. Rather I can going to make a single carriage return and type a single letter:
With only 13 characters in the edit box, this is what my HTML generation looks like:
Google Blogger has used 497 characters to describe just 13 characters.
Again, I realize that by and large Google's Blogger system is a free-of-financial-cost tool. Google does expose it as a professional option which has been used by CEO's like Rahool Sood of VoodooPC. The old http://voodoopc.blogspot.com/ still directs to http://www.rahulsood.com/, which at first glance still seems to be using the Google Blogger interface. Google also appearently utilizes the content generation Engine in some of it's Premier Business edition tools.
By the same token, Mozilla Seamonkey Compozer is also free-of-financial-cost. Yet the HTML generation of the two software systems is dramatically different. Google's Blogger Compozer is a bloated wreck of an application that adds browser-context-sensative html code.
On a small scale viewpoint the massive train-wreck that is Google's Blogger HTML generation isn't that big of an issue. Internet Speeds are increasing on an across the board basis, and Microsoft has finally figured out that upholding Industry Standards in it's browser might stop the flood of users to competing browsers. What's the big deal if Google Blogger generates a massive amount of redundant and useless HTML code?
The problem is the scale of Google itself. Google hastens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, if not potentially millions of active users worldwide. Google goes to great lengths to design datacenters to hold and sort through information. Google goes through a great deal of engineering work to cool these data-centers off and exhaust the massive amount of heat that can be generated.
Okay, fine, one person turning 64 characters of text into over One Thousand Characters of Text is not really a bad thing. 10,000 users turning 64 characters into over One Thousand Characters IS A BAD THING. 100,000users is even worse than that. 1,000,000 uses would generate over 1,000,000,000 characters of text for 64,000,000 characters. This now goes from the realm of small potatoes into that's actually a large amount of bandwidth through the network and storage space on the hard-drives.
Google's formatting system for Blogger NEEDS TO BE FIXED. Getting a handle on HTML formatting and fixing the underlying formatting controls would have a direct and immediate effect on operating network bandwidth, processing time, and file-size storage. I mean, I really would have thought then that an upgrade to Blogger's content generation would have focused on streamlining the HTML generation processor. Instead, the system has gotten even more bloated and more ludicrous in the generation of HTML.
This type of generation is something I would expect from a MICROSOFT PRODUCT.
Over the past couple of years that I've been writing this blog, I've been reluctant to well, talk about myself. Of course, this meant disappearing for months at a time with only a trickle of posts, then a flood of posts, then another disappearance, and so on. I've also mentioned my dislike of taking donations, instead pointing readers to other sources who needed it more.
Well, now I'm having to bite a bullet here and actually ask for help.
Short version is, I'm not exactly healthy. I wrote about one of my major problems back on live journal several years back, where I was determined by the Augusta Neuroscience Doctors to have a pinched nerve, one they couldn't locate, and one Blue Cross / Blue Shield wasn't willing to continue to fund treatment for. The basic problems of the pinched nerve is that my legs will cramp up, and my muscles can quite literally rip themselves apart. Other symptoms include prolonged work leading to my legs locking up and my knees turning purple. I don't like to talk about this because I'd rather not admit that I'm injured, or go through the hassle of filing for a disability since I'm not really disabled... as I see it.
The second major problem, well, I think I've mentioned here, is my blood pressure, which has normally been high. Earlier this year I came down with an illness, and was thrown into the hospital for intense dehydration and a blood pressure systolic reading of 80. Which caused a couple of double-takes from nurses, at least one "you should be unconscious" statement, and more than a few "you walked to your hospital bed?" questions.
Also, over the past couple of months, my bad legs and back and have, well, come back to haunt me, causing their own pain and driving a bad case of insomnia. So, I've been on and off stuff like Fioricet, Ultram, Mobic, Flexeril, Naprosyn, and Ambien.
Which brings me to the problem of... now. Since I was dismissed from AC, I haven't been able to find another job local to me within the realm of tech support or computer repair, outside of a part-time job as a family systems administrator. Immediately, this means I have a still looming hospital bill that I can't pay.
Which means I am now at the point of, well, needing help.
I really wanted to have something more to show for this post, which is why I kept putting it off. My, direct intent, had been to work on getting a proper book published, and to that end I've been putting some of my old Callaer stories together. I've uploaded the progress that I've made on piecing these stories together to Google Docs:
Forward
Part 1: Origins
Part 2: Exit
Part 3: Roxanne
From this point though, I don't know where to start with to get a publishing deal. The last time I had anything published in a proper book (mostly poetry), my English teachers took care of all the details.
My, immediate plan of action then, is to finish editing the first few parts I have now and create an Ebook on Lulu. I had wanted to have an Ebook ready for purchase, but the more I put off making this post, the more difficult it is going to be for me to make this post.
I am also, at this point, willing to do something I haven't been willing to do in the past, which is move. I haven't been wanting to leave the Augusta area largely because of my health issues. There is a certain amount of comfort being in a hospital town, and with doctors being somewhat familiar with my medical background.
I think that's really all I have to say for now... I'll try to get back to posting opinion pieces on tech and finishing up several game reviews I've had on the table.
Meanwhile, I can hope that a game studio decides they need another writer or somebody to handle tech support... maybe I should go poke Valve.
Might as well go ahead and address this. The content from Gamenikki.com can currently be found at www.gamenikkiinexile.com
It's a long and ugly story, and I think the shortest way I can explain the situation is that somebody at the hosting provider decided to stop answering the telephone.
Of course, this means that jason at gamenikki dot com is out of commission. I can be reached at jason dot frothingham at gmail dot com, or mepisguides at gmail dot com.
One of the questions I get asked on a regular basis is how I get a separate window to track combat statistics in City of Heroes
, as shown with my ice tank here:
To get this pop-up, simply open up Combat Attributes from the Power Tray
Here we have our list of the avatar's vital stats.
As can be seen, I typically monitor my Ice Tank's Smashing / Lethal Defense, Recovery Rate, and Endurance consumption.
If you Right Click on a combat stat in the main power window, there's a pop-up with an option to Monitor Attribute.
So, if I Right Click on Energy Defense and Left Click on Monitor Energy Defense..
Energy Defense is added to the combat tracking window.
Basically, you can monitor all of the vital stats of an avatar.
Have fun keeping track of your character.
to be overpriced, too hot, and too power hungry. I'm not even sure the 
I picked up some time ago could handle 3 470's in Triple SLI. I have an even lower opinion of the 
. Yes, the GTX 480 is more powerful than a stock 
, but if you check the links that I'm putting in here, it's not near as makes no difference $100 more powerful. 
